Complexity of Faceted Explanations in Propositional Abduction
2025 (English)In: Theory and Practice of Logic Programming, ISSN 1471-0684, E-ISSN 1475-3081, Vol. 25, no 4, p. 775-793Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
Abductive reasoning is a popular non-monotonic paradigm that aims to explain observedsymptoms and manifestations. It has many applications, such as diagnosis and planning in artificial intelligence and database updates. In propositional abduction, we focus on specifying knowledge by a propositional formula. The computational complexity of tasks in propositional abduction has been systematically characterized – even with detailed classifications for Boolean fragments. Unsurprisingly, the most insightful reasoning problems (counting and enumeration) are computationally highly challenging. Therefore, we consider reasoning between decisions and counting, allowing us to understand explanations better while maintaining favorable complexity.We introduce facets to propositional abductions, which are literals that occur in some explanation (relevant) but not all explanations (dispensable). Reasoning with facets provides a more fine-grained understanding of variability in explanations (heterogeneous). In addition, we consider the distance between two explanations, enabling a better understanding of heterogeneity/homogeneity. We comprehensively analyze facets of propositional abduction in various settings, including analmost complete characterization in Post’s framework.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Cambridge University Press, 2025. Vol. 25, no 4, p. 775-793
Keywords [en]
computational complexity, fine-grained reasoning, Post’s framework, propositional abduction
National Category
Artificial Intelligence
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-214265DOI: 10.1017/S1471068425100215ISI: 001564073400001Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105015159666OAI: oai:DiVA.org:liu-214265DiVA, id: diva2:1963259
Conference
ICLP 2025 - Unical, Rende (CS), Italy, September 12-19, 2025
Funder
ELLIIT - The Linköping‐Lund Initiative on IT and Mobile CommunicationsSwedish Research Council, VR-2022-032142025-06-032025-06-032025-11-05